Civil Rights Gone Wrong

By Ryan Bomberger, Chief Creative Officer of The Radiance Foundation

Who would have imagined a world where the nation’s largest black civil rights groups would partner with the one organization that destroys innocent life for a profit? Who would have envisioned an alliance between those who’ve fought for the humanity of an oppressed people and an industry that engages in the ultimate form of oppression—the killing of defenseless human beings?

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The Urban League. The Congressional Black Caucus. These are organizations whose history has shown that black Americans can rise, can be empowered, and can achieve great things. These are also organizations that have offered their souls to a self-anointed savior with empty promises of birth control, reduced poverty, “healthcare” and “reproductive freedom.”

How can we rise if our future is flushed down the drain? And we mean, literally, flushed down the drain. Over 1,000 times a day, the body parts of black babies are torn from their mother’s womb, ground in garbage disposals and washed away like sewage. This is the reality of “choice” that often scares women away from any other option that doesn’t end in death. Despite the reality that more black babies are aborted than born alive in NYC (although all abortions are a tragedy), the nation’s largest black “civil rights” groups have done nothing to address this epidemic. Live Action and Lila Rose have exposed the seedy actions of abortionists and Planned Parenthood, specifically, for years in video stings that prove an industry that accepts racist donations for black abortions, protects sex traffickers, grossly misinforms pregnant mothers about prenatal development and practices infanticide.

Even when presented the most grisly of violence against the most marginalized minorities–the unborn–these former civil rights champions refuse to fight for what’s right. Serial killer and abortionist Kermit Gosnell gave his clean abortion room to white patients and the filthy ones to blacks and other minorities. If Gosnell were a hotel owner these “civil rights” groups would have held press conferences and demanded action.

But they can’t speak out against an industry they, ironically, support.

The NAACP has fought ferociously to protect abortion and to try to silence The Radiance Foundation from exposing how pro-abortion they are.

Planned Parenthood has dominated the urban landscape since its own birth in eugenic racism, but rates of unintended pregnancies, STDs, fatherlessness, and abortion have only increased exponentially since Roe v. Wade. (The majority of Planned Parenthood’s abortion mills, 79%, are located in black and Hispanic neighborhoods as revealed in the latest comprehensive abortion facility study by ProtectingBlackLife.org). The Roe judicial opinion repeatedly invoked the 14th Amendment, the one that finally ascribed people of my complexion, full citizenship and humanity (at least on paper). Yet, these organizations stand with an industry that mocks civil rights history by allowing the same denial of humanity to be foisted upon another group of humans—the unborn and even those delivered alive.

How is it that these so-called “leaders” advocate the destruction of black life, the number one killer in the African-American community, and call it “Reproductive Freedom?” Most black “civil rights” groups speak of empowerment. Death doesn’t empower the black community. These groups decry health disparities. Yet, they ignore the most deadly one plaguing urban America—abortion. They bemoan “lack of access” to healthcare while ignoring the thousands of pregnancy care centers that offer free medical services and life-affirming resources to mothers and their children. These groups speak of political influence through the power of the vote. Abortion has eliminated over 15 million black voters since 1973. That’s real voter suppression.

NATIONAL URBAN LEAGUE

Each group is guilty of both silence and complicity. Each has its way of downplaying its alliance with Planned Parenthood to the public, but their tangled relationships are revealed in deeply troubling ways. The National Urban League (NUL) focuses mostly on two things: jobs and prison. Interestingly, jobs are far less likely for those without fathers in the home, and prison is far more likely for children without fathers in the home. But NUL doesn’t even mention ‘fathers’ or ‘dads’ one single time in their annual “State of Black America” manifesto. One of

Urban League-owned building houses Planned Parenthood in Madison, WI.

NUL’s executives, Jacqueline Ayers, is simultaneously the Legislative Director of Health and Education Policy at National Urban League and the Director of Legislative Affairs for Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Prior to this apparent concurrent role, she was the Senior Legislative Representative for Planned Parenthood for 4 years. This entanglement may explain why the Madison, Wisconsin Urban League-owned building also leases space to none other than the state’s largest abortion chain, Planned Parenthood (see pic to the right).

THE CONGRESSIONAL BLACK CAUCUS

The Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) is staunchly pro-abortion. The Chairman of the CBC, Representative Emanuel Cleaver, was recently given the annual Margaret Sanger Award, which is Planned Parenthood’s highest “honor” for promoting abortion. Reverend Cleaver, before running for federal office, used to be pro-life and served as an advisor for Missouri Citizens for Life. Pro-life advocate Catherine Davis asked Representative Cleaver, during a Capitol Hill Summit on issues facing black Americans, if he’d address the issue of abortion in the Congressional Black Caucus. Predictably, he said “no.”

THE NAACP

The nation’s second oldest civil rights organization claims it has not taken a position on abortion—a false assertion repeated numerous times by its former President, Benjamin Jealous, and its current Vice President of Advocacy, Hilary Shelton. But they passed a resolution (see page 41 in NAACP 2003-2004 Health Resolutions) in February 2004. You can also see their own press release here to support the “right” to abortion and the radical pro-abortion “March for Women’s Lives”–a Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and NOW event. That event, originally named the “March Against Fear” was created by NOW as a defiant response to the passing of the Partial Birth Abortion Act, banning the gruesome procedure of partially birthing a child then severing his/her head from the rest of the baby’s body. The most radical of abortion “procedures” was what convinced the NAACP to throw its support behind Big Abortion.

Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion chain has been a corporate sponsor of the NAACP’s annual conventions. The NAACP has not only taken a position on abortion, they’ve taken the abortion giant’s money for financial gain. (It’s important to note that the millions of dollars Planned Parenthood uses to market itself, as in Corporate Sponsorships, are made possible by the yearly $542.4 million taxpayer dollars that feed the abortion chain’s annual one billion dollar budget). The Radiance Foundation has written numerous articles about the NAACP’s actual and provable advocacy of abortion. (However a federal judge has forced The Radiance Foundation to remove and destroy all of those articles in an alarming ruling against free speech in The Radiance Foundation v. NAACP. This ruling has been appealed to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.)

Ryan Bomberger joins members of the National Black Prolife Coalition including Dr. Alveda King in DC.

It’s no surprise that liberal black “leaders” help to further the abortion-centered mission of Planned Parenthood. It became a reality with Planned Parenthood’s launch of the Negro Project, using prominent blacks to promote a deeply racist eugenics agenda. As part of this effort to “severely reduce” or “eliminate” the birth rate of poorer blacks, Dr. Dorothy Ferebee (member of the Advisory Council for the Birth Control Federation of America, now Planned Parenthood) echoed the exact eugenic sentiments that are used, with minor semantic changes, today: “The future program should center around more education in the field through the work of a professional Negro worker, because those of us who believe that the benefits of Planned Parenthood as a vital key to the elimination of human waste must reach the entire population, also believe that a double effort must be made to extend this program as a public health measure to Negroes whose need is proportionately greater.”

Dr. Dorothy Ferebee was black and advocated for an organization rife with pseudoscientific racism, elitism, hatred of Christianity and unapologetic population control. Some things never change.